A few days ago Search Engine Land announced that the Google PageRank Toolbar has been updated for the first time in ten months. The news has sent millions of website owners into a frenzy with reports that of many people sitting at their computers in funny hats smiling.
The reality is that most website owners do not pay attention to page rank. Years ago, a website’s worth was defined by how much green love Google was giving it. The story is different today. As Spencer Haws pointed out yesterday, PageRank is one of many factors Google considers when it ranks a website. Over the years, the weight given to PageRank has decreased. Today, Google looks at so much more than the PageRank of a website.
Spencer did a search for some keywords and found that the websites at the top of search results had a lower PageRank than the websites at the bottom. I doubt this will surprise any of you, however it is telling to see this occur in so many search terms.
What I do not understand is that Google still promotes their PageRank toolbar. Why do Google still publicly tell the world the PageRank of a website? Why do they encourage internet users to download the PageRank toolbar?
Perhaps a better question is, why are Google not as vocal about other ranking factors such as page authority? Is it simply a matter of nostalgia with PageRank?
My own recommendation is to not spend too much time worrying about PageRank. Google uses it as a factor when ranking your website, so it is still important, however it is one of many factors being used to rank you. My advice is to focus on building a high quality website. This will help generate more incoming links from good websites and, in turn, help your PageRank increase.
Thanks for reading,
Kevin
I bought a domain name not long ago primarily because it had a PR of 3 but was just a “placeholder” site. I put up pages of content and was actively trying to live up to the PR.
WHAM! Google takes me down to PR 0.
Like Kevin always says, concentrate on quality.
Yeah selling text links is still a legitimate way to make money, regardless of Google’s view on it. The irony is that if they were not so public about what PageRank a website had, advertisers would not be buying links.
I make a large chunk of my income from writing sponsored posts (we’ll leave the debate of how ethic this kind of money earner is for another time) and PR is still considered vital by the advertisers, many of them will even overlook writing ability.
I did few things about SEO when switching to Genesis like authorship, proper use of headings and some keyword usage, but it’s incorporated into Yoast’s SEO plugin. In my opinion more important is what you taught me – building relationship with readers and writing content that is worth clicking tweet or like.
I never worry about SEO. In the past, I did try and look at SEO more and spend time checking stats and analysing keywords. However, I feel my time is better spent writing articles.
Thanks to your post I noticed my PR increased and is 4 now. It’s so easy to forget about such things.
I’m also very curious what other factors Google pays attention to. It would be easier to build optimized website and then just focus on content instead of SEO and stuff.